scholarly journals Replacing Rules by Neural Networks A Framework for Agent-Based Modelling

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Jäger

Agent-based modelling is a successful technique in many different fields of science. As a bottom-up method, it is able to simulate complex behaviour based on simple rules and show results at both micro and macro scales. However, developing agent-based models is not always straightforward. The most difficult step is defining the rules for the agent behaviour, since one often has to rely on many simplifications and assumptions in order to describe the complicated decision making processes. In this paper, we investigate the idea of building a framework for agent-based modelling that relies on an artificial neural network to depict the decision process of the agents. As a proof of principle, we use this framework to reproduce Schelling’s segregation model. We show that it is possible to use the presented framework to derive an agent-based model without the need of manually defining rules for agent behaviour. Beyond reproducing Schelling’s model, we show expansions that are possible due to the framework, such as training the agents in a different environment, which leads to different agent behaviour.

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dale Larie ◽  
Gary An ◽  
R. Chase Cockrell

Introduction: Disease states are being characterized at finer and finer levels of resolution via biomarker or gene expression profiles, while at the same time. Machine learning (ML) is increasingly used to analyze and potentially classify or predict the behavior of biological systems based on such characterization. As ML applications are extremely data-intensive, given the relative sparsity of biomedical data sets ML training of artificial neural networks (ANNs) often require the use of synthetic training data. Agent-based models (ABMs) that incorporate known biological mechanisms and their associated stochastic properties are a potential means of generating synthetic data. Herein we present an example of ML used to train an artificial neural network (ANN) as a surrogate system used to predict the time evolution of an ABM focusing on the clinical condition of sepsis.Methods: The disease trajectories for clinical sepsis, in terms of temporal cytokine and phenotypic dynamics, can be interpreted as a random dynamical system. The Innate Immune Response Agent-based Model (IIRABM) is a well-established model that utilizes known cellular and molecular rules to simulate disease trajectories corresponding to clinical sepsis. We have utilized two distinct neural network architectures, Long Short-Term Memory and Multi-Layer Perceptron, to take a time sequence of five measurements of eleven IIRABM simulated serum cytokine concentrations as input and to return both the future cytokine trajectories as well as an aggregate metric representing the patient’s state of health.Results: The ANNs predicted model trajectories with the expected amount of error, due to stochasticity in the simulation, and recognizing that the mapping from a specific cytokine profile to a state-of-health is not unique. The Multi-Layer Perceptron neural network, generated predictions with a more accurate forecasted trajectory cone.Discussion: This work serves as a proof-of-concept for the use of ANNs to predict disease progression in sepsis as represented by an ABM. The findings demonstrate that multicellular systems with intrinsic stochasticity can be approximated with an ANN, but that forecasting a specific trajectory of the system requires sequential updating of the system state to provide a rolling forecast horizon.


2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 18-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Ronald ◽  
Theo Arentze ◽  
Harry Timmermans

Decision making in models of activity and travel behaviour is usually individual-based and focuses on outcomes rather than the decision process. Using agent-based modelling techniques and incorporating interaction protocols into the model can assist in modelling decision-making in more detail. This paper describes an agent-based model of social activity generation and scheduling, in which utility-based agents interact with each other to schedule activities. Six different protocols are tested. The authors show that the model outcomes reflect minor changes in the protocol, while changing the order of the protocol leads to significantly different outcomes, hence the protocol plays a large role in the simulation results and should be studied in more detail.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10) ◽  
pp. 54-62
Author(s):  
Oleksii VASYLIEV ◽  

The problem of applying neural networks to calculate ratings used in banking in the decision-making process on granting or not granting loans to borrowers is considered. The task is to determine the rating function of the borrower based on a set of statistical data on the effectiveness of loans provided by the bank. When constructing a regression model to calculate the rating function, it is necessary to know its general form. If so, the task is to calculate the parameters that are included in the expression for the rating function. In contrast to this approach, in the case of using neural networks, there is no need to specify the general form for the rating function. Instead, certain neural network architecture is chosen and parameters are calculated for it on the basis of statistical data. Importantly, the same neural network architecture can be used to process different sets of statistical data. The disadvantages of using neural networks include the need to calculate a large number of parameters. There is also no universal algorithm that would determine the optimal neural network architecture. As an example of the use of neural networks to determine the borrower's rating, a model system is considered, in which the borrower's rating is determined by a known non-analytical rating function. A neural network with two inner layers, which contain, respectively, three and two neurons and have a sigmoid activation function, is used for modeling. It is shown that the use of the neural network allows restoring the borrower's rating function with quite acceptable accuracy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-158
Author(s):  
Lindsay MacDonald

We investigated how well a multilayer neural network could implement the mapping between two trichromatic color spaces, specifically from camera R,G,B to tristimulus X,Y,Z. For training the network, a set of 800,000 synthetic reflectance spectra was generated. For testing the network, a set of 8,714 real reflectance spectra was collated from instrumental measurements on textiles, paints and natural materials. Various network architectures were tested, with both linear and sigmoidal activations. Results show that over 85% of all test samples had color errors of less than 1.0 ΔE2000 units, much more accurate than could be achieved by regression.


2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 30502-1-30502-15
Author(s):  
Kensuke Fukumoto ◽  
Norimichi Tsumura ◽  
Roy Berns

Abstract A method is proposed to estimate the concentration of pigments mixed in a painting, using the encoder‐decoder model of neural networks. The model is trained to output a value that is the same as its input, and its middle output extracts a certain feature as compressed information about the input. In this instance, the input and output are spectral data of a painting. The model is trained with pigment concentration as the middle output. A dataset containing the scattering coefficient and absorption coefficient of each of 19 pigments was used. The Kubelka‐Munk theory was applied to the coefficients to obtain many patterns of synthetic spectral data, which were used for training. The proposed method was tested using spectral images of 33 paintings, which showed that the method estimates, with high accuracy, the concentrations that have a similar spectrum of the target pigments.


Author(s):  
Muhammad Faheem Mushtaq ◽  
Urooj Akram ◽  
Muhammad Aamir ◽  
Haseeb Ali ◽  
Muhammad Zulqarnain

It is important to predict a time series because many problems that are related to prediction such as health prediction problem, climate change prediction problem and weather prediction problem include a time component. To solve the time series prediction problem various techniques have been developed over many years to enhance the accuracy of forecasting. This paper presents a review of the prediction of physical time series applications using the neural network models. Neural Networks (NN) have appeared as an effective tool for forecasting of time series.  Moreover, to resolve the problems related to time series data, there is a need of network with single layer trainable weights that is Higher Order Neural Network (HONN) which can perform nonlinearity mapping of input-output. So, the developers are focusing on HONN that has been recently considered to develop the input representation spaces broadly. The HONN model has the ability of functional mapping which determined through some time series problems and it shows the more benefits as compared to conventional Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). The goal of this research is to present the reader awareness about HONN for physical time series prediction, to highlight some benefits and challenges using HONN.


2013 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 457-466

Artificial neural networks are one of the advanced technologies employed in hydrology modelling. This paper investigates the potential of two algorithm networks, the feed forward backpropagation (BP) and generalized regression neural network (GRNN) in comparison with the classical regression for modelling the event-based suspended sediment concentration at Jiasian diversion weir in Southern Taiwan. For this study, the hourly time series data comprised of water discharge, turbidity and suspended sediment concentration during the storm events in the year of 2002 are taken into account in the models. The statistical performances comparison showed that both BP and GRNN are superior to the classical regression in the weir sediment modelling. Additionally, the turbidity was found to be a dominant input variable over the water discharge for suspended sediment concentration estimation. Statistically, both neural network models can be successfully applied for the event-based suspended sediment concentration modelling in the weir studied herein when few data are available.


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